Matching Up: Producing Proximal Service in a Los Angeles Restaurant

Tip Work: Examining the Relational Dynamics of Tipping beyond the Service Counter

“…Tips cannot simply be understood as a derivative of customer behavior but a social process shaping its own outcomes. Analyzing tip work at the level of the shop floor also draws needed attention to intralabor divisions found within many settings of interactive service labor today (Subramanian and Suquet ; Wilson ). Future analyses of tip work should continue interrogating contemporary tipped workplaces using ethnographic methods adept at capturing how particular workers negotiate the social and structural organization of their labor settings.…”

“…In Los Angeles and other large U.S. metropolitan areas, back‐of‐the‐house, untipped restaurant jobs are racialized as “brown‐collar” work mostly held by unskilled Latino immigrant men (Cantazarite ; Gomberg‐Muñoz ; Waldinger and Lichter ). By contrast, front‐of‐the‐house, tipped jobs are disproportionately held by class‐privileged, white, young men and women, who managers believe to represent the “right” social and physical assemblage that will help attract customers (Jayaraman ; ROCU ; Williams and Connell ; Wilson ). These two categories of racialized, classed, and gendered jobs make up durably unequal worlds of work within restaurants (Wilson ).…”

“…By contrast, front‐of‐the‐house, tipped jobs are disproportionately held by class‐privileged, white, young men and women, who managers believe to represent the “right” social and physical assemblage that will help attract customers (Jayaraman ; ROCU ; Williams and Connell ; Wilson ). These two categories of racialized, classed, and gendered jobs make up durably unequal worlds of work within restaurants (Wilson ).…”

“…These internal distinctions can have very real consequences for workers. Different categories of service labor not only require distinct types of tasks and skills but also result in asymmetrical work schedules, shop floor interactions, and total earnings (Adler and Adler ; Wilson ). In U.S. metropolitan restaurants, for example, servers and bartenders typically work shorter hours than cooks, but with tips, these dining room‐based employees can earn two to three times more per hour than kitchen‐based employees (Haley‐Lock and Ewert ).…”

“…Many restaurants and other kinds of interactive service establishments also maintain a social division of labor along race, ethnic, class, and gender lines. Those situated in front‐of‐the‐house jobs are often disproportionately white, class‐privileged men and women, while those in the back of the house are disproportionately immigrant Latino men (Gomberg‐Muñoz ; ROCU ; Waldinger and Lichter ; Wilson ). Studying the “downstream” implications of tips—that is, what transpires away from customers and after a gratuity is handed over—matters precisely because of how it can imprint the social and organizational relations found within interactive service settings.…”